Adjectives are words that describe the qualities or states of being of nouns: enormous, doglike, silly, yellow, fun, fast. They can also describe the quantity of nouns: many, few, millions, eleven. In sum, they are words that modify or describe nouns, but do not modify verbs or adverbs or other adjectives. The adjectives are easy to spot because they come immediately before the nouns they modify.

Adverb is a word that is used to change, modify or qualify several types of words including an adjective, a verb, a clause, another adverb, or any other type of word or phrase, with the exception of determiners and adjectives, that directly modify nouns. A good way to understand adverbs is to think about them as the words that provide context, such as a description of how, where, when, in what manner and to what extent something is done or happens. We can easily spot an adverb by the fact that it often ends in –ly, but there are lots of adverbs that end in different ways.